


the dearest freshness deep down things

by Indices



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: Dreams, F/F, Horror, SCP-2191, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21721867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indices/pseuds/Indices
Summary: Negrescu’s interview, and the Hoia Forest, stay with her. Perhaps more than they should.
Relationships: Dr. Judith Low/Klavigar Lovataar (SCP Foundation)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	the dearest freshness deep down things

It is a testament to her many, many years of working for the Foundation that the occasional nightmare fails to bother her anymore.

Usually, her work keeps Judith busy enough to sleep dreamlessly, the afterimages of ancient scripts still visible when she closes her eyes. Daevite and Mycenaean Greek, Proto-Uralic and Proto-Yeniseian; and Old Adytite, its strange forms and offshoots twining endlessly in the blackness behind her eyelids. 

But even those vanish, eventually. And sheer tiredness takes away the prospect of additional visions—or at least, the prospect of remembering anything that might appear to her in REM.

Of course, some do slip through. Most of them without rhyme or reason. She had this dream a few weeks ago where she did nothing more than lay still in a field of grass, on a sunny day, while her gaggle of grandnieces and grandnephews played somewhere nearby. Someone chattered pleasantly as they took utensils out of a picnic basket. Right before she woke up, near the edge of the forest, a swarm of butterflies had taken flight.

It had been... nice.

(Never mind that she hasn’t spoken to most of her family in ages. And in hindsight—had those butterflies borne a slight resemblance to SCP-408?)

For the most part, Judith doesn’t wax nostalgic for dreams. She neither misses nor minds them. The way she sees it, there is very little that could scare her beyond what she’s already gleaned from the Foundation’s own reports and transcripts, and those she’d gotten over in the early days.

Besides, the world can’t afford distraction. They have their hands full these days—more than full, really. Overflowing, with 2133 and Sitra Achra and the Flesh that Hates, the Church and Nälkä’s duty-dance with death boiling over into the modern day, without even mentioning their respective splinter factions.

And then, the thing under the Balkans.

She thinks of it sometimes, on the rare break from poring over manuscripts, while the coffee machine works sluggishly. Thinks of the harvest, Foundation-condoned. Of the entire peninsula caved into the ground. Fifty-five million people turned into fuel for the Klavigar. Of Draga Negrescu’s look of rapture as she spoke of the Mother. _Tinder for the gods._ The woman’s eyes had burned with something too lucid by half, back then; bright and wan, drained for devotion. 

Judith has visited the aboveground site, just once. Only the first floor of the temple complex, a few days before the interview. That was as far as they would allow her to go. 

Standing in that hollow, echoing interior, surrounded by the forest with its oddly curving trees—she could see why someone might still mistake it for an Orthodox monastery. The air had smelled of nothing but dust; the mustiness of old books. There had been no underlying scent, faintly coppery, nor any indication of something unimaginably massive churning far below, pale roots extending for miles. 

Just an ordinary afternoon. The sunbeams caught motes of dust as they streamed in through the high windows, and Judith had found herself thinking back to those quiet hours she’d spent in the library as a child, reading books about pythons or dentistry until the shadows slanted long.

And yet, thinking back, she can’t shake the feeling that something’s been... jarred in her, since then.

Because she’s been dreaming again.

* * *

Nearly every night, Judith finds herself back in the temple. Still the first level. It's mostly a replica, from the general architecture to the precise arrangement of dust and sunbeams.

(She notifies the Foundation, of course. But since she doesn’t experience any adverse side-effects, after days of monitoring, they only have her submit a report whenever it happens.)

Even so, Judith knows better than to let down her guard for the appearance of normalcy. Just because she wasn’t transported directly into the writhing dark of the gestation chambers doesn’t mean that these dreams can’t be anomalous. In fact, it only enhances the possibility. Why else would she dream of this place? It must have made an impression on her, but no more than scores of other anomalies that she’s had to work on within the past month alone. 

And in her dream, there’s a statue that she hasn’t seen before. 

It’s in the very center of the central room, erected on a pedestal that could be made from basalt. Humanoid. Carved from cream-colored… stone? From this distance, it seems to stand at a typical human’s height, but as Judith approaches (approaches?) she can see that—no, it towers over her, easily ten feet tall. The material glistens more than any marble she’s seen. (Absently, she wonders if it would give to the touch, like a slab of something pored and proteinaceous.)

Then: the subject.

At first glance, it looks like a woman. Nude, with flowing hair that reaches her waist, and a serene expression on her upturned face. Her eyelids are lowered enough that it looks like she could be sleeping. The hands are held out at hip-level, inclined slightly, as if to receive something from before her. 

Except that the nails on those hands and feet are more like a tiger’s, the head crowned with great backwards-curving horns and bedecked in jewelry carved from that same glistening material, in exquisite detail. Even her mouth bears the impressions of fangs. 

_The Mother_ , she thinks. Remembers the feverish tone of Negrescu’s voice. _Here she was planted and here she grew._ Ion's baleful bride, the Highblood Redeemer, who rejected her station for love and the promise of faith. Or so go the texts.

_Lovataar._

* * *

Night after night now, it’s her and the Klavigar’s statue. She’s inspected it, taken notes on everything she could remember on waking, and dutifully sent in the reports, one by one. With the Foundation’s approval, she’s even devised a few interview questions.

During the day, when she has a bit of time, Judith commits them to memory. They might come in handy later. It’s not out of the question.

(When she tries to locate the entrance, or the door to the lower levels, they are nowhere to be found. She’s not sure if she should be relieved by this.)

They’re not all lucid, these dreams. Sometimes she finds herself doing things that don’t make much sense. One day she says aloud, for no particular reason, “Aren’t I a little too old for this?”

The strange logic of somnolence. Still, before this recent spate, she can’t remember the last time she had dreams about scantily-clad, improbably attractive women—or even statuary thereof. (But it was possible that there had been such a time. There was a reason she never had any grandchildren of her own.)

What she doesn’t expect is for a voice to answer.

“Do you think so?”

Judith blinks; has to lean on her dream-cane until the spell of nausea passes. When it does, in place of the statue, there is—

_sickly-sweetness that blooms in the air, pooling honey and amniotic fluid, the sound of ten thousand exoskeletons crawling, the smothering warmth of cells multiplying_

—something hard to look at.

But something.

Not a statue. In the flesh.

Her eyes water, as though someone has been cutting onions. She forces them to focus. 

Gold is the first thing that meets her eye. Gold, glittering off the multitude of bangles on arms still humanlike, plucked out from individual strands of hair like Rumpelstiltskin’s wheel. Bedecking fingers and ears and horns high above. Dazzling, against the greys and browns of the temple interior. 

And then the red, fresh-spilled and arterial. Painted on skin, or something made to look like it. Are those designs Daevite? They look similar. 

(Perhaps not, considering the hagiography. But it could be an alteration. Potentially noteworthy. Distantly, Judith wonders how much of this will stay with her when she wakes.)

All told, the being that stands in front of her isn’t shaped too differently from the statue of before. Save that now her eyes are open fully, the color of dried blood, fixed unerringly on Judith’s face. More amused than serene. Still motionless. 

The silence grows overbearing. The unchanging afternoon, its motes of dust forever falling; suspended at the center of this vast, deserted building with the lone shaft of sunlight between them. And now, this. 

It would be better to break it.

“...Lovataar.”

The Klavigar smiles. Wider. Wide enough for teeth. “You know my name.” In that voice is the gentle susurrus of locusts swarming, and the slick of small eggs bursting open, and the low murmur of an unbroken heartbeat. 

Judith rests both hands on her cane. 

“Well,” she says, dryly. “It’s in the job description.” 

The words come out in a language Judith has never spoken, but certainly interpreted. No need to guess which. It must be the dream that makes this possible, too.

“In all honesty, Klavigar Lovataar, I never expected to meet you.” She considers her words. “If this counts as a meeting. Would you be willing to answer some questions?” 

It was a long shot. Laughter like a ruptured membrane, and Lovataar drops down to sit on the pedestal in one sinuous motion, legs draping over the edge. “That depends. On a number of things. Would you?”

“Unlikely,” Judith admits, tilting her head. “What do you have in mind?”

Out of all the queries she could have imagined, the one that comes is unlike any of them.

“How has your family been?”

Lovataar leans forward, chin propped up on a hand, eyes gleaming ferrous as old coins. “Ah. Your sister. She died years ago, didn’t she? But even she lived in a place far away. And you’ve neither seen nor heard much of the rest at all, ever since.”

Judith keeps her expression blank, her voice cool and steady. It isn’t difficult. She’s conducted enough interviews. If her hands want to tremble, even in a dream, then that’s what dream-canes are for.

“Why, exactly, am I here?”

“That,” says the Klavigar, “is for you to decide."

"And if I decide that I'm here to interview you, without being questioned myself?"

"All I ask," Lovataar continues, bypassing that smoothly, "is for you to entertain something. Are you not a woman of venerable age, doctor?”

She doesn't wait for an answer. "For that you have my commendation. It is no small feat, given what you are, and your... craft. But you are alone. You _have_ been alone. And in time, even the most resilient of your kind must surrender to the way of all flesh."

Judith stares back at her, impassive. She supposes the steely, seldom-employed glare of the Senior Adviser has little hope of working here, but it’s worth a shot.

"You desire conciliation. But you are not ready. You fear you will never be ready, and that time is running out."

A blink, and she is at eye-level with Judith, laying nearly prone on the pedestal. Close enough to smell the rot and honeysuckle. "There is a way out. You could have all the time that you need. A hundred families, if it should come to that."

Judith breathes out. In the end, she imagines that some group or other would have tried this anyway, if it wasn’t here and now. She’s positively surprised that it’s taken so long. Then again, this is no run-of-the-mill cultist.

In a way, it’s almost flattering.

"No."

The word is out of her mouth after scant seconds of feigned consideration. "Your efforts are appreciated. But please don't bother. The answer is ‘no,’ Klavigar. I will not be your Simon Oswalt."

Lovataar makes a scornful noise. "Renegades and pretenders. They will know the truth of the Old God in time, and it is no visage of kindness that will gaze back at them. They do not have what _he_ did."

"No, the old sects do not recruit. Nor should I." She props herself up by the elbows. The pose might have seemed vaguely comical, if this was an at all appropriate setting. "Think of this as an association. A mutual point of contact, for someone with your... unique set of knowledge."

From that alone, Judith wants to move into a line of questioning, but the scent of spoiled flowers has become too cloying. Her eyes keep tracing the faint ring of gold along the inner circle of those rufous irises, and for a moment the whole scene flickers. Like a film reel malfunctioning.

_She sees the walls underground, veined and pulsating, the chambers of the heart and the void beyond, an endless sprawling madness of organic matter underpinning the partitions of reality. Its seams and lacing, so terribly fragile. Lovataar's children, the spawn of their theology, worming through the webwork for the means to some inevitable end that all of them (not on this peninsula nor even Earth, but more than that, so much more) hurtle towards sightlessly._

Soon, this dream will end. Judith doubts she will have another. She tries to memorize all of it—for the reports, Judith tells herself, but the sense of loss is sharp and inexplicable.

"Really, doctor." The slow curve of a painted lip, and the teeth underneath. "No need to look like that. Wouldn't I know?"

She closes her eyes. A hand tips up her chin. 

"Consider it." 

* * *

Judith awakens with a terrible migraine. She is in her own bedroom, sitting up in bed, hands clasped as if in prayer. 

In her mouth, faintly bitter, is the taste of honey.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur.”
> 
> This was largely inspired by Perelka_L’s artwork of Dr. Low and Lovataar, which can be found on [Metaphysician’s page](http://www.scp-wiki.net/metaphysician), under the tab labeled “ART.” Also, it goes without saying, by the characters and SCPs created by Metaphysician.


End file.
